Software development thoughts and ideas

Tag Archives: rails

CanCan was written by Ryan Bates to make role based security simple and fast for Ruby on Rails applications. It was first published in late 2009 and was the go to role based security gem for rails applications. There were several reasons why so many developers wanted to use it. Some of those reasons were because it was fast, easy to setup and worked well. Support for the original CanCan gem ended in mid 2013. Ryan Bates decided to take a break from development all together so the gem was forked by Bryan Rite and is being maintained by him today. This allowed the gem to work with the latest version of rails and is able to keep working when new versions of rails are released. As one of the developers that use’s CanCanCan I can say that it’s just as stable as it’s ever been. It’s a mature gem by this point in time so you won’t see too many breaking changes if any.

Features

One thing that I really love about CanCan is that it gives you an ability class that allows you to define all of your roles and what they can do in one place. You can define as many roles as you want and have them share operations with little effort. Also you are able to assign multiple roles to a user. This will give you the flexibility to only have one role for one purpose. Instead of mixing roles together to fit some custom role you need. You are able to just give the user two roles instead. Another thing that I found really useful is you can pass in a set of criteria that can be applied to the role check. For example a user creates a new record. That record belongs to that user and should only be able to be viewed or edited by that user. With CanCan you can simply pass in a scope like can :edit, ModelName, user_id: user.id. This will apply this scope to the check so only the user who created the record will be able to view or change it. This is really powerful because you can do it all in one place. If you want to setup multiple roles per user simply following this guide (Role-Based-Authorization). Here is how I implemented it based on that how to.

One thing I learned while working on my project using CanCan is you need to setup the scopes for the can statements. Originally when I had developed this project I did not add these scopes on. This gave any user the ability to edit any record they had access to. So for example a user was able to view and edit a record that they did not create. This would have caused major issues if it wouldn’t have been caught before going live. Here is an example on how you can provide a scope to your can statement.

can :show, Vehicle, id: user.vehicles.map { |vehicle| vehicle.id }

This will allow a user who’s user_id is in the vehicle table and only that user to view that record. So if a user decided to change the id in the url they will get the access denied error message. You can do this with any active record call as long as it ties back to a user.

Alternatives

When originally choosing CanCan I took the time to look into a couple of alternatives. One of the major players today in rails is Pundit. When Ryan decided to take a leave from the development world a lot of people started looking for an alternative to CanCan. Since it was no longer going to be maintained. A lot of people chose Pundit. I have never used or setup Pundit fully but while doing my research I couldn’t figure out a good way to assign multiple roles to one user. Leave a comment if this is actually simple and I just missed it in the Pundit documentation. I’m sure this is possible but I didn’t want to invest the time digging through the code to find out. CanCan had good documentation in how to do so. At the end of the day I encourage everybody to do their research and determine the solution that best fits their application. I’ve seen CanCan used in multiple applications and so far it’s been able to handle everything thrown at it.

Wallproductions is a portal like site that will contain many applications. Currently it contains a couple of applications Gas Tracker and Budget Tracker. Both of these projects are live and are in production use. Over the years it’s gone through a couple of transformations. When it was first created it was a side project. It was something to work on during the weekends to see what was possible outside of what I was doing at work. The reason why the project started was due to a lack of existing applications that did what I wanted. So I set out to create my own.

When it was originally written it was done using PHP. It started out without an off the shel framework. This was a pretty good solution for a while until the project started to get larger. The larger it got the more I thought about it. I was thinking that a framework would be needed. Unless I wanted to spend all my weekends doing tedious things that were already done in the various frameworks. As the only developer working on the project it was important to be able to complete tasks with speed. So instead of creating everything myself I could use some shared code from the framework to handle all of the standard things. Things like ActiveRecord and Routing. So I looked around and I found a couple of frameworks. At the time the Yii framework seemed the most appropriate for my situation. The reason why I choose Yii instead of the other frameworks was simply because I was more familiar with how their ActiveRecord implementation worked. Also it had a pretty good extensions library so I could reuse code shared by others in the community. So I went with that and build the second version of Wallproductions off of it. This worked well and it stayed in the Yii framework for about two years.

During this period of time I change directions in my career and instead of doing PHP development I started doing Ruby development. Specifically working with Ruby on Rails. I did not know much about Ruby or Rails when I started. But after working with it for a short amount of time I was able to be more productive than ever before. Over the course of the next year Wallproductions stayed in the Yii framework. Making additional features and fixing existing bugs. Then the Yii framework introduced their new framework Yii 2. This was a complete rewrite of the framework. So I had a decision to make. Do I want to stay on the first version of Yii for a long time, do I want to rewrite the majority of my PHP code or just move to Ruby on Rails. Seeing that I work on Ruby on Rails on a daily basis it was an option. After carefully considering it I decided that I wanted to go with Ruby on Rails. So I set off on the path of rewriting my entire site using Ruby on Rails.

The first step was to gather all of the old requirements for the system. Then I needed to make sure that I met them. This was not very hard as I was the only developer on this project. Also since I wrote the entire application myself I didn’t need much documentation to understand it. Also I needed to set milestones for myself so I knew I was progressing. I didn’t want to get stuck and then have to go back. But I also didn’t want to keep spinning my wheels if it wasn’t going to work out. As I am sure you realize we all have had side projects that we start and then never finished. I decided early on that if I was going to put a ton of effort into converting Wallproductions I would finish.

The conversion itself actually went faster than I expected. I knew Ruby was very powerful and Rails added even more power to it. What I did not realize is how much power it added. I was able to convert something that I worked up for over three years in under three months. This was not your typical conversion either since it was going cross languages. Also I was not working on this conversion process full time. I was doing so like always on the weekends or nights after regular working hours. Now that I am on Ruby on Rails I am able to complete new tasks at greater speeds. At the end of the day I am glad that it’s on Ruby on Rails. I am a huge fan of the framework and the language. Also the community around it is really good.

Phusion Passenger is one of three big players in the rails server game. The other two players are Unicorn and Puma. No matter which one you choose if you can configure it correctly and get through the setup process all of them work. All three of them are considered viable and able to handle the job. In my opinion though I feel that Passenger is the best out of the three.

Support

The first reason why I really like Passenger is because they have really great documentation. If you are unable to resolve your issue after reading through their documentation you didn’t look close enough. For example this is Passengers documentation for their nginx module. Yeah it has a ton of configuration options that you can just stick into your nginx configuration file and go. Also if you are wondering why something is not working you will be able to find the answer easily either by going through the documentation yourself or going to Google. If you Google for an issue using Unicorn you will probably end up finding it but it could take you a while. When I consider choosing a technology to use support is the first place I look at like am I able to get support and is the tool so easy to use that I most likely won’t need that support. If the answer is yes to both of them to me that is a good place to start. If the answer is yes to documentation but not to suppose I think that is an okay starting point. Sometimes you will not be able to find both.

Popularity

This one is a little controversial as the saying goes just because it’s popular doesn’t mean it’s great. That saying does hold true in some cases but when it comes to technology it usually doesn’t mean that it usually means a good sign. I have noticed that people in technology usually don’t stick with something too long if it’s not satisfying their needs. Passenger has great support including the rails core team. It also has support from some major companies including Basecamp, The New York Times, AirBnb, and Apple to name a few of them. If you would like to see a bigger list check out builtwith. Now the argument could be made that all of these companies have no clue what they are doing using Passenger but they all have very high levels of traffic and are well known as reputable companies. There is a reason why and passenger is a tool that helps them get there.

Ease of Use

To be totally honest I only have experience in running Passenger and Unicorn. I have never had the experience setting up Puma so I will only be comparing Unicorn and passenger here. Although I have looked at Puma’s documentation and it doesn’t look so bad. Unicorn seems to be pretty easy to install on a single instance rails server. You can get your rails application up and running in a short amount of time. There are a lot of Unicorn scripts out there to get you started and up and running. The problem with Unicorn is when you have to do anything outside of running one application on the server. Dealing with multiple environments on one machine is possible (I think) but it seems like it wasn’t made for that. It also feels like Unicorn isn’t fully polished yet. Small things kept coming up like shutting down a Unicorn process without using the kill command. Like that example it just feels like commands that are suppose to work don’t. Now to be honest I am no server administrator so the problem may be obvious to someone else. So if you are a experience Unicorn professional these arguments could easily be debunked. The problem is most rails developers are not and therefore that argument really doesn’t matter. A lot of companies are rolling with developers being the server administrators also so the easier the tool is the better.

Install passenger is also a very simple process. The reason why it’s so simple is it ships with an installer that installs both passenger and nginx. You also install passenger and apache if that is your goal. In my case it was nginx. How cool is it that you get both nginx and passenger with one install. If you already installed nginx it’s recommended that you remove it and then run the passenger install. Also once it’s installed and started passenger handles everything else. This holds true even when you have multiple environments running on the same server. You don’t have to do any extra configuration to set this up either. You basically create another nginx file point it to the directory and go. Of course if you are adding another application on you will have to restart nginx but not passenger. Also passenger comes with a couple of pretty cool tools to monitor memory and performance. You simply type in the following command to get the memory usage.

rvmsudo passenger-memory-stats

Yes it’s that easy to monitor your rails processes. Unicorn you have to manually so a ps -ef | grep ‘unicorn’ to see the process. I suppose there are some tools like this for Unicorn but they don’t see as obvious to use. This tool is built into passenger so you can run it from anywhere you have an application running.

At the end of the day you have to use a tool that works best for your situation. Is passenger that tool probably but if you are an experience server administrator tools like Unicorn may be better. We all have our reason for choosing our toolset but you should have justification for those reason. At the end do whatever makes your life easier. In my case Passenger made my life easier as a non server administrator.

Today I was working on my Gem Toolshed and wanted to install it globally. That way I wouldn’t have to add it to each of my projects Gemfile. Then run bundle install on each. The reason why I didn’t want to do that was first of all would take more time than I wanted. Also if I could just install it globally I wouldn’t have to worry about installing it for new projects. Also for this type of Gem it’s nice to be able to use it outside of a projects context. So I attempted to install it globally so that it could be used by all my projects. I am not too familiar with rvm or bundler to be honest. I have used both of them but I don’t understand enough about them to be called an expert. So I ran the following command in an attempt to install it globally. Note that I did not pull this command out of thin air I found it on a stackoverflow post and it looked promising.

gem install /home/path/to/gem

After spending several hours debugging it I finally figured out what was happening. Well it turns out that not only does that command not work but it also switches the gem install default to that directory. I figured this out through several debugging steps. The first step was when I went into a different project and did bundle install. This is a project that I have been working on for a while so I was expecting it to just work. Well when I ran bundle install I seen it was looking at my gems directory. I was thinking well something must be in the path and kind of just ignored it. I didn’t put the two together for a while. After thinking about it for a while I thought that bundler has to be smart enough to know my rvm is setup to use a specific gemset. Well it turns out that is not the case if you have a customized path like I did. It installs it to whatever directory you put in that path above. I verified that this was happening by going into my Gems directory and there is was a ruby directory with ruby installed. After doing some searching on how to fix it I found that this worked to reset the gem install back to the default directory.

bundle install --system

After doing that my system was back to normal and I was able to run bundle install again without any issues. I hope that this post can provide some insight that bundler and rvm don’t always work hand and hand. If you ever try the gem install command above remember to set it back so all your bundler commands work as expected. At least I can say I now understand more about bundler and rvm as a whole.

I have used both fixtures and factories in writing tests. I actually use both currently I use fixtures for my personal project and factories at work. I feel that their can be benefits to both but if I had to go with one I would go with fixtures. It seems to me that you can do everything and more with fixtures. Also your test suite stays a little more organized.

The first question one may ask is what is the difference between a fixture and a factory. Well a fixture is a set of data that is static in nature. This data will get loaded for each test run. A fixture is created using a static file within your testing structure. This is different for each language you use it in. For example in Rails it will be a yaml file while in PHP it’s just an array. This could also depend on the framework your using. If you want the table to start out empty you can create an empty fixture file. Having the static file allows you to setup specific test scenarios. Then you can write your tests around those scenarios and you know the data will always be the same. So if a test shall fail you know it’s not because of a dataset change. In contrast factories create the object and the data at the same time. The database is not stocked with any preloaded data. If you need data for your specific test case you need to call the factory and have it create the data for you. Instead of creating a static file you need to create a factory file. This file will contain the name of the factory and then any custom data you need. Using a factory can have some benefits as you will get random data so your code is being tested against unknown data. Which may be reasonable as you have outside users using your system passing in random sets of data to.

So why do I feel that fixtures are better than factories if fixtures take longer to setup. I find it that factories tend to get messy as you have data objects being created all over your test suite. No factory is identical so you tend to have to work though a lot of different data scenarios. Also if you don’t setup your factory to pass in the proper data you could get false positives. For example maybe your interface validates a field to be one of three values. But you forget to setup your factory with one of those values. Now your tests are failing but the interface and application are running just fine. I suppose you could make the argument you can make the same mistake in a fixture but I feel you have to think about it more as you are filling this data in. Another reason why I don’t think factories are better is they are slower running. For example if you create your fixture files they run once per test run. But they run fast because they don’t have to use active record and create the object. Factories do create an object while creating the data. This takes extra time especially if you have setup a lot of data in your scenario. Another issue I have with using factories is you have to setup your data scenario on each test. You can keep it dry in a way by calling sub classes but again a lot of times you end up just doing factory.new because it’s a one off type of setup. So you tend to duplicate setting up factories a lot especially in a larger development team.

I feel that using either factories or fixtures will be fine. But I feel that fixtures gives you a slight edge for keeping your test suite organized. You are able to write tests against predictable scenarios. Also you are not having to repeat the same datasets over and over again. I feel that this is easier to avoid using fixtures rather than factories.